Oh my gosh, no. Don't even, no. Go to Vegas.

March 28, 2024 12:44 PM

Are the Middle Ages a good destination for a bachelor party? What backstory should you use to avoid saying you're a time traveler? Will you be instantly identified as a witch and burned at the stake? Here's some advice for time traveling to medieval Europe (and an addendum with the answer to some common questions)
posted by simmering octagon (34 comments total)

Oh this is really fascinating. I spent 18 months in Nurnberg Germany thanks to Uncle Sam A very medieval city. Of course rebuilt due to the bombing in WW2. But the Germans are meticulous at that sort of thing. A high point of my younger years indeed.
posted by Czjewel at 12:57 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

The trickiest bit will be getting a smallpox vaccination, assuming you aren't old enough to have gotten one as a child. Probably the very worst thing you could possibly do is bring smallpox back to the present.
posted by jedicus at 1:04 PM on March 28 [7 favorites]

My least favourite part of my wedding was the "bachelor party". I didn't want one, but some well-meaning but annoying friends decided to drag me to a strip bar the night before regardless. My cheap friends didn't tip for sh!t and we almost got tossed out. Strip bars have never really been my idea of a good time. I imagine the Middle Ages would just be worse.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:35 PM on March 28 [5 favorites]

My least favourite part of my wedding was the "bachelor party".

My best man was actually my ex-girlfriend and I had to be very strict with her about not having a bachelor party. She tried to convince me by saying that it didn't have to be a wild time; it could be anything I wanted. I countered that I'm a grown man with money; I get to do whatever I want all the time and I don't feel the need to drag a bunch of other people into it. Eventually I had to make it clear that if she tried to throw me a surprise bachelor party she wouldn't be allowed to be my best man anymore and that was that.

My wife did have a bachelorette party in Vegas and it was a disaster. She had six bridesmaids when they left and two when they got back, several decades-long friendships got torpedoed over the course of a long weekend.

There's basically no part of the wedding tradition at which I do not look askance, but the bachelor/ette party is a strong contender for being the worst.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 1:45 PM on March 28 [19 favorites]

On the bachelor party digression - I've only ever been "traditional" bachelor party adjacent once and that, from the tales, was a wild shit show. All the parties I've been to, including my own, were basically a boy's night out at a brewery/pub with maybe a cigar if we were feeling particularly rebellious. That's about my speed.

On the Middle Ages, hell no I'm not going. My lungs would seize and collapse in 3.4 second.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:05 PM on March 28

Strip bars have never really been my idea of a good time.

They always struck me as the equivalent of mocking a hungry person by waving a steak in front of them.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:38 PM on March 28 [9 favorites]

I think the advice is kinda odd. It spends too long on crime at the beginning for some reason... like middle ages was just roving bands of criminals. Like if you have a time machine and can take a dagger and period appropriate clothes, and are even worried about that, then take a gun and some karate lessons. You can learn old timey languages but not how to use a sword?

Also why be concerned about backstory? You're from far away and a nobleman. Maybe on a pilgrimage. They were extremely common.

Also Europe had 80 million people in the middle ages. I'm not sure it's accurate to describe it as 'remote camping'. It's like if an area not that much larger New Mexico and Texas doubled it's modern population.

Also they built absolutely huge gothic, romanesque, and so-on architecture. Constantinople the city had around 1 million people in population in 1100. They weren't all criminal bumpkins obsessed with status is what I'm saying.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:39 PM on March 28 [5 favorites]

On the Bachelor Party derail: for my own, about five years ago, a bunch of my friends got together (about 14 or 15 of us total, mostly dudes, but one woman and one enby there as well) to rent a house on the Jersey Shore where we could just hang out and party and cook good food and stuff for a long weekend. At one point there was a whale-watching cruise for a couple of hours, and at another point we did a live reading of a Buffy episode. There were no strippers, which I would have been deeply uncomfortable with. These things can be whatever you want them to be.

(My wife and her friends did a similar thing, but with, like, their own silliness and no live-Buffy-reading, as far as I know.)
posted by Navelgazer at 2:53 PM on March 28 [4 favorites]

I want to go back to the middle ages and open a Medieval Times restaurant.
posted by rhizome at 3:13 PM on March 28 [5 favorites]

“You see, in the future there’s this thing called Twitter…”
“In the future you talk to birds?!”
“No, no, it’s a place where anyone can go and say…”
“Everyone talks to birds?!!”
“No, but they could talk together and it was better than Facebook—"
“You have books full of faces?!!!”
[Gets burned at the stake.]
posted by chasing at 3:39 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

I would go and join a goldsmithing guild...It would be so much fun.
posted by Czjewel at 3:46 PM on March 28

Yeah, wear the fanciest clothes you can afford (because you’re an emissary from Prester John dontcha know), have a knife-proof undershirt, some assorted concealable weaponry, some glow-in-the-dark stuff like compasses or whatever (ooo, eastern secrets!), some lens-grinding gear, and set yourself up somewhere quiet making glasses, telescopes, and such.

Encourage troublesome sorts to go fight for Prester John. Even draw them an accurate map, and you won’t be seeing those guys again.
posted by aramaic at 3:46 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

If you must travel to middle-ages Europe, at least remember to bring nacho supplies.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:48 PM on March 28

I see this video is over an long and before I commit I just want to ask: does this begin with Step 1: "Be a white male" , Step 2: "Don't be a nonwhite nonmale"?
posted by MiraK at 3:49 PM on March 28 [2 favorites]

If you must travel to middle-ages Europe, at least remember to bring nacho supplies.

We take it for granted today, but a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:17 PM on March 28 [15 favorites]

I see this video is over an long and before I commit I just want to ask: does this begin with Step 1: "Be a white male" , Step 2: "Don't be a nonwhite nonmale"?

He does, although not at the top, bring up the gender issues inherent with virulent patriarchal power structures of the age, and he does offer a couple examples of what to do re: gender. Race didn't really get as codified within dominant power structures until the dawn of the triangle trade, so it isn't discussed as much in the video IIRC.
posted by Philipschall at 4:22 PM on March 28 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I did not have a "bachelor party". Thank god.

We had the rehearsal dinner, which was a bit bit weird, and we went back to the house, and then my mates said, "let's go out out and smoke a bowl", which we did. And then came back to the house, and everyone was all like, "where did you all go?" Awkward...

Glad my peeps at that time were not "bros" who would advance that kind of nonsense...

I don't need a stripper. I have found my person...

I can get wasted on my own, thank you.

35 years now. I'm OK with that.
posted by Windopaene at 4:46 PM on March 28 [1 favorite]

'The Ox and Coxcomb'
posted by clavdivs at 4:54 PM on March 28

There is a book, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (2008), that is structured like a traditional travel guide but in this case for 14th century England. What to eat, where to sleep, sights to see, what to wear, how to greet people, etc. But with loads of detail, including issues concerning disease and crime. He has a whole chapter on health and hygiene. He notes that people who spend their working day up to their neck in excrement will bathe before going home. Less filthy jobs require less bathing, but people overall kept themselves pretty clean. I highly recommend this book as it gives a much more personal look at history as it describes how people then actually lived. Liza Picard has a series of books about everyday life in Elizabeth's London, Restoration London, Dr Johnson's London, and Victorian London. These books are great too, as you get to see how society changed over time. One of my favorite books about daily life in the past, England from 1600 to 1770, is Emily Cockayne's book Hubbub - Filth, Noise, & Stench in England. No matter how you view current everyday life, it's quite eye and other orifices opening to see how everyday life was back then.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:02 PM on March 28 [21 favorites]

MetaFilter: criminal bumpkins obsessed with status
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:03 PM on March 28 [7 favorites]

More book recommendations: Charlie Stross' The Merchant Princes series is a very readable and fun exploration of what could happen if travel between our modern day world & another medieval-ish world was possible.

The series' unimultiverse is cleverly structured: it isn't time travel backwards to some point in our universe's own history, but travel sideways from our familiar modern Earth to a parallel reality Earth where events played out nearly the same, but some aspects of human history played out a bit differently, so development is lagging. This elegantly avoids all time-travel causality-violation nonsense -- all universes in the multiverse are at the same point in time and time evolves forward at the same rate in all of them -- and provides a way to add in more parallel Earths as the series rolls on.

Superficially this sounds like you might be in for a Narnia-ish fantasy series, but so much of the plot is governed by the science fiction lens of "OK, given these assumptions of how this universe is set up, then what would happen? And then what? And then what?". It's already great fun in the first book with a basic cross-world arms (guns exported from modern Earth to medieval-ish Earth) for drugrunning-logistics trade (it's hard for modern Earth countries to detect drugs crossing their borders if the border gets crossed in a parallel universe), and gets increasingly bonkers in later books.
posted by are-coral-made at 5:25 PM on March 28 [6 favorites]

IDK I'm not married but the friends' bachelor parties I've been to have all been like "okay this is my excuse to get my far flung friends together for a party and we'll have the kind of party that we like" which generally has meant stuff like board games and moderate drinking. I have not been to a "traditional" bachelor party with gross stuff in the vein of "celebrating your last weekend of freedom because after you get married you'll have to make good decisions and/or pretend to be less misogynist"
posted by aubilenon at 5:31 PM on March 28 [3 favorites]

vaguely related: medieval time travel film.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:50 PM on March 28

We took our kids to Medieval Times and when the MC/King made announcements, he welcomed some guy's bachelor party, then put his head in his hands and said, "Martin...Marty...Mart...DUDE...why?" (That MC/King was pretty good. But not as good as the first time we went, when the King had a thick New Jersey accent: "Dat may be, sir knight, but I am da king in dis castle!")
posted by PlusDistance at 6:57 PM on March 28 [1 favorite]

You could get some of this info in a more entertaining way by reading Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, about a well-planned medieval time travel expedition that goes, uh, not to plan. But there's lots of detail in there.

If you could take things with you and bring them back, you would definitely need decontamination both ways to keep people here and in the past free of novel germs.
posted by emjaybee at 7:35 PM on March 28 [8 favorites]

I see this video is over an long and before I commit I just want to ask: does this begin with Step 1: "Be a white male" , Step 2: "Don't be a nonwhite nonmale"?

Or Jewish. I don't practice anymore but I guess I look "Jewy" enough to have elicited all sorts of weird comments throughout my life. I know "Middle Ages Europe" is pretty vast temporally and spatially, and that there were times and places where interfaith relations were actually pretty good, but in general I'd be terrified of setting foot in some part of town or wearing some article of clothing or whatever forbidden to Jews in that time/place and being punished accordingly, let alone landing in some period where Jews where just outright exiled or killed.
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:25 AM on March 29 [6 favorites]

I like his observation that pretending to be from a religious order located somewhere a little too distant to cross-verify would probably be the best cover for looking and sounding rather odd. That would probably also apply for a future time traveler coming back to the present day.
posted by rongorongo at 3:33 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

I watched the video and he actually does spend a decent amount of time covering race and religion. Race wasn't really a construct in the same way as it is today. Africans were considered people who just got a lot more sun. And he discusses the diaries of a Chinese traveller in Europe where his looks were not so much the issue as his beliefs.

Regarding religion, he does discuss Jews and how they formed a known but separate society so if you did want to wander the lands outside Jewish circles you would have to subdue any outward religious tells. The most dangerous thing, apparently, was to identify as Muslim. That could get you into a lot more trouble.

What he misses and then tries to semi-apologize for in the second video, is the experiences of women vs. men. He does state that most of what he said applied to women as well as men but it sounds like a weak after-the-fact statement.

As a potential time-traveller, I still had the question of how you even get money to buy things when you arrive, or what you should bring with you to sell for coins. Silver? In what form? Who do I go to to get a good exchange rate?
posted by vacapinta at 10:01 AM on March 29 [3 favorites]

I love how this whole thread sounds like "oh sure, time travel's totally a Thing, as commonplace as airline travel!" and now we're all simply working out logistics for our upcoming vacation.

Do they accept Travelers Cheques in the Middle Ages?
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:16 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

I still had the question of how you even get money to buy things when you arrive,

For many times and places there are enough surviving coins that we know were circulating at the time that you could have quite good replicas made, out of the appropriate alloy.
posted by jedicus at 1:54 PM on March 29

I'm wondering if it occurred to him that a single woman traveling alone might have issues. Or that she might have to bring along a man as a fake husband/bodyguard/escort/something. "I didn't give advice for how to settle down as a woman in medieval Europe," he says, he's expecting you to be a 1-2 week long tourist. Meanwhile I keep thinking of Outlander (okay, different time period) and how Claire basically had to get married off Right Away, or what happens if your time machine breaks and you're stuck there. Like he mentions that he's thought of it, but... I dunno.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:27 PM on March 29 [1 favorite]

He doesn't recommend that anyone travel alone in medieval Europe, regardless of gender.
posted by skoosh at 3:24 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

I still had the question of how you even get money to buy things when you arrive,

Via replicas or items you can trade, like spices. I think someone in the comments recommends pepper.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:03 AM on April 1 [1 favorite]

Also, just for fun this is a bit outside the time period we are talking about time traveling to, but here are some common recipes and jobs that people do, and laws that people have to follow.

Also discusses the public humiliation that went in place of jail time.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:03 AM on April 1